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Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China

Students at a figure-drawing class at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Credit
Miranda Mimi Kuo-Deemer for The New York Times

BEIJING

ON a recent lazy afternoon Wang Haiyang, a student at China’s top art school, was quietly packing away some of his new oil paintings in the campus’s printmaking department. He is 23, and he just had his first major art exhibition at a big Beijing gallery.

Many of his works sold for more than $3,000 each, he said. And he hasn’t even graduated.

“This is one of my new works,” he said proudly, gesturing toward a sexually provocative painting of a couple embracing. “I’ll be having another show in Singapore in March.”

For better or for worse — depending on whom you talk to — Beijing’s state-run Central Academy of Fine Arts has been transformed into a breeding ground for hot young artists and designers who are quickly snapped up by dealers in Beijing and Shanghai.

The school is so selective that it turns away more than 90 percent of its applicants each year. Many of its faculty members are millionaires and its alumni include some of China’s most successful new artists, including Liu Wei, Fang Lijun and Zhang Huan. And with the booming market for contemporary Chinese art, its students are suddenly so popular that collectors frequently show up on campus in search of the next art superstar. At the annual student exhibition the students no longer label their works only with their name and a title. They leave an e-mail address and cellphone number.

Yet as the academy reshapes its mission and campus, its flowering relationship with the art market is stirring unease among those who feel that students should be shielded from commercial pressures.

“The buyers are also going to the school to look for the next Zhang Xiaogang,” said Cheng Xindong, a dealer in Beijing, referring to an art star, one of whose paintings sold for $3.3 million at a Sotheby’s sale in London in February. “And immediately they make contact with them, even before they graduate from school, saying, ‘I will buy everything from you.’ ” (A similar phenomenon has been observed in recent years at hot art schools in New York and Los Angeles.)

“This can be a dangerous thing,” he said. “These young artists need time to develop.”

Yet many counter that the school’s soaring fortunes also result from the Chinese government’s growing tolerance of experimental art, which was once banned. While Beijing still censors art that it deems politically offensive, including overtly critical portrayals of the ruling Communist Party, economic and market reforms have changed the way the government thinks about art and the way the Central Academy trains young artists.

In the 1980s the school occupied a modest plot of land near Tiananmen Square in central Beijing where the faculty rigidly taught Soviet-style Realist art to about 200 students, many of whom were destined to work for the state. Today the school has a new 33-acre campus and more than 4,000 students. It offers majors in design and architecture and abundant courses in digital and video art, and some of its graduates are making millions.

In the old days, Mr. Zhu said, students had a passion for art. “They viewed art as a way of life,” he said, “and Central Academy was a talent pool. Now, as society has changed, more and more students view art as a job. Students are more practical.”

The nation’s other leading art schools are undergoing similar makeovers. The China Academy of Art, which has trained some of the country’s most inventive artists, boasts a huge new campus in the eastern city of Hangzhou. (It was formerly known as Hangzhou Academy.) In western China the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, which has a reputation for training great painters, received more than 64,000 applications this year for just 1,600 openings.

Photo

Yu Hong, a faculty member, painting at her studio in Beijings art district.Credit
Miranda Mimi Kuo-Deemer for The New York Times

But no school has as much clout as Central Academy, the only arts college directly supported by the central government in Beijing. And recently, academy administrators say, the support has been extremely generous.

The school’s new gray-brick campus, 10 miles north of Tiananmen Square, has hip cafes, attractive dining facilities, spacious classrooms and art studios, and sophisticated equipment, including high-powered computers and Autodesk video editing systems that cost as much as $200,000 apiece. The campus also has an impressive new 160,000-square-foot museum and art gallery designed by the prominent Japanese architect Arata Isozaki.

Faculty salaries average just $700 a month, but the pay means little to most of these teachers, whose canvases might as well be painted in gold. Liu Xiaodong, a Central Academy graduate who has been on the faculty since 1994, often portrays China’s disadvantaged, for example people displaced in the Three Gorges Dam area, site of one of China’s biggest development projects. Yet Mr. Liu is among the country’s wealthiest artists; a huge Three Gorges painting sold at auction last year for $2.7 million, a record for a contemporary Chinese artist at the time.

Sui Jianguo, the school’s dean and one of the country’s most acclaimed sculptors, has seen his works sell at auction for as much as $150,000. And Zhan Wang, a professor and sculptor, is successful enough to employ more than 40 workers in his studio on the outskirts of Beijing.

The prestige of teaching at the nation’s most elite arts school remains a major draw for such artists, particularly at a time when China’s art scene is flourishing. This year the Central Academy managed to lure back Xu Bing, 53, a past winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s so-called genius award, from New York, where he had worked for the last 18 years.

“China is the most avant-garde and experimental site in the world,” said Mr. Xu (pronounced shoe), now the school’s vice president for international relations. “Everything here is new. There’s so much happening, and I want to be a part of it.”

Mr. Xu’s work was controversial in the 1980s, when China had just begun to open up to the West, and his return was a bit of a surprise to the Beijing art world. His 1988 mixed-media installation “A Book From the Sky,” consisting of hand-printed books and ceiling and wall scrolls, appeared to replicate ancient literary texts but in fact contained fake, unintelligible characters. Viewed as a clever critique of Chinese government propaganda, it created a sensation when it went on view at the National Art Museum in Beijing. He was also a popular teacher at the academy in 1989, when many students were complaining about government restrictions that prevented them from freely expressing themselves, in art or speech.

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When pro-democracy demonstrations broke out in Tiananmen Square that year, many students and younger faculty members from Central Academy joined the protests, even making the plastic-foam-and-papier-mâché sculptures of the “Goddess of Democracy,” which became a symbol of the student movement.

Mr. Xu said he doesn’t worry about government interference with artists or censorship. “The old concept about art and government being at odds has changed,” he said. “Now artists and the government are basically the same. All the artists and the government are both running with development.”

Many of the changes in the Central Academy’s mission grew out of the efforts to develop a new campus, which also meant rethinking the school’s mission. Some faculty members were leery of the move from the old campus, which began more than five years ago with a relocation to a temporary site.

One professor, Sui Jianguo, made sculptures to protest the move, some of which showed deformed human figures lying in the rubble of the old campus as it was being demolished. But now he is happy with the changes at the academy. “The whole education system had to be done in a new way, which turned out to be better,” he said, referring to the openness to new ideas and new majors.

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Xu Bing, a MacArthur Foundation award winner, was lured back to China from New York to be part of the academy.Credit
Miranda Mimi Kuo-Deemer for The New York Times

Some faculty members privately lament the decline of traditional Chinese painting and disciplined training in centuries-old mediums. And some complain that today’s art students are not as inspired or idealistic as those in the 1980s.

But other teachers said that their students, largely born in the ’80s, simply reflect the changes sweeping China, which have brought more wealth to the country and given it more of a global consciousness. While the enormous growth of the Central Academy has opened the way for students without a grounding in traditional mediums, they say, many are highly skilled nonetheless.

“I think the students are more a mix of the best and the mediocre,” said Yu Hong, a painter who has taught at the school since the early 1990s. “But there are some students better at drawing than when I was a student.”

“Their vision is broader,” she said of the students over all. “They’ve experienced much more.”

Most of the faculty agrees on one major shift: The students seem less interested in politics and more concerned about their personal struggles and issues of identity, not unlike artists in the United States and Europe.

For example Wang Haiyang, who will graduate this year, paints canvases depicting someone who looks very much like himself: short, with large, expressive eyes and what might be described as a troubled soul. He depicts his character with a physical double, in sexual poses, in violent acts and in women’s clothing. “They tell my own story, my mentality,” he said of his works. “The whole process of art is like a process to cure myself.”

Raw expression is on ample display at the academy. Students, once required to paint the same figurative portrait again and again, are now encouraged to look deep within themselves and to be creative. Given that the school is no longer purely about painting and sculpture, they can find outlets in areas like photography or new-media art. Majors can eventually lead to career choices like designing video-game characters for big corporations.

Chi Peng, who graduated in 2005 with a new-media degree, is viewed as a success story. He broke into the international art market a few years ago, at 25, with a series of photographs in which his naked image sprinted through the streets of Beijing with blurry red planes in hot pursuit.

Today he sells his computer-enhanced photographs for as much as $10,000 apiece. A decade ago Central Academy graduates who were lucky enough to sell a painting shortly after graduation would have been delighted to earn $100.

Mr. Chi calls himself an “80s boy,” part of a new generation that grew up in a freer, more consumer-oriented society. “It’s hard to define the 80s generation,” he said. “Our generation is a little tender but not spoiled.”

As for the pressures of the fast-moving art marketplace, which encourages artists to brand themselves for big collectors, he acknowledges some ambivalence.

Reflecting on his career ascent, he said: “It’s fast, really fast. I never could have imagined this, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing for me.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR31 of the New York edition with the headline: Schooling the Artists’ Republic of China. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe